


the before (and inexorable after)

by frumpledsweater



Category: Ghostbusters (2016)
Genre: AU, Backstory, F/F, Parallel Universe, abby and holtzmann friendship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-14
Updated: 2017-04-11
Packaged: 2018-10-05 03:39:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10296644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frumpledsweater/pseuds/frumpledsweater
Summary: She doesn’t believe in fate, but the universe has a way of dropping gifts at her feet that alter her world. It’s not that she doesn’t seek out the things that she wants, that she covets. It’s just that the things that really matter, they have a way of finding her.orA story about epochs and the blessings that fall into Holtz’s lap. AUish.





	1. before it all

**Author's Note:**

> This has been living in my docs for a while so I thought I'd let it out into the wild. It follows some of the events that take place in the movie but not all. A parallel universe, if you will. Primarily Holtz POV. Multiple chapters. Comments welcome. Enjoy? Or don't, that's your prerogative. :)

 

 

 

She doesn’t believe in fate. The universe is too chaotic and cold for some grand scheme that has wound all of history’s events and decisions together with razor-thin precision.

 

She thought a lot about it when she was young, but an intangible ideal never compared to the things she could touch. She could run her hands over the chalky fossils that jutted from limestone near the stream behind her elementary school. Her science teacher had beamed down at her when she tried to lug them home in a tattered green backpack that made her back bow under the weight. That was the week that she learned how to count the strata in the rocks. Her first taste of time and space and their physical boundaries.

 

She doesn’t believe in fate, but the universe has a way of dropping gifts at her feet that alter her world. It’s not that she doesn’t seek out the things that she wants, that she covets. It’s just that the things that really matter, they have a way of finding her.

 

She doesn’t believe in fate, but she does believe in hope.

 

( _ . . . )

 

“Can I be honest with you, Jillian?” the woman says as she pushes her glasses up to rest on top of soft brown hair. She’s looking at the young girl across from her with a mixture of fondness and something that rhymes with pity but isn’t quite.

 

Jillian looks up sharply and brings a hand to her mouth, biting softly on her thumbnail. She internally debates the merits and implications of honesty and dishonesty. The arbitrary conundrum of verbal communication. She never was any good at sussing out people’s intentions, relying on a system of trial and error that to this point hasn’t made her many friends, just earned her odd glances and an orbital of extra space around her as she walks down the hallway or sits down to eat in the cafeteria. Her science text never mentions how the gulf between atomic orbitals must feel like the empty space between planets, but she thinks she knows that for herself.

 

She isn’t very good at reading people, but if someone is freely offering up a declaration of intent then why pass it up? She blinks once, twice. Shrugs before mumbling a “sure.”

 

The office is small and cramped and she doesn’t need to speak loudly for the woman across the paper-ridden desk to hear. The plaque on the door says ‘counselor’ but Jillian has only ever been into this room at the behest of her teachers. They don’t like it when she blurts out corrections to their blunders during class, or when she tells the boys two grades above her how to hack the snack machines by the library, or when she confuses her classmates by talking about material that they won’t be covering for three years or more. Proper etiquette for a 12 year old girl is… confusing? Boring? Jillian isn’t sure if it’s one or both.

 

“I think you should leave this school.”

 

Jillian blanches. She can’t remember doing anything expulsion worthy. Her mind drifts to the robot she finished last week. It _did_ have a hammer attached to a primitive rotating arm, but she was careful not to test it in view of the shop instructor, was sure to sweep up all of the smashed bits of the unsuspecting clay pot from the stock room of the art department.

 

Jillian’s eyes widen for a beat, two, before her face becomes blank. She knows that if she leaves it that way for too long it will only make the woman across from her angry, but she doesn’t want to let slip the tumult of emotions growing inside her chest. Adults want to _see_ her thoughts break through her face, to analyze them and understand them (‘she’s such a _strange_ girl’), but only if they’re the _right_ thoughts. So Jillian keeps a catalogue of expressions. Has figured out the precise muscles to flex to contort her face. She collects expressions and flips through them like clothes in a closet, pulling on the appropriate wear for the occasion. Except she isn’t very good at fashion either, so sometimes she wears overalls to presentations, or laughs when she’s not supposed to.

 

She can feel the pull and pressure like a physical force but she hasn’t pinpointed the source. If conformity and expectations are a social gravity, emanating from a large mass, or just an emergent property of so many bodies moving in tandem. She doesn’t want to push the boundaries until she knows what she’s up against; until she _understands_. Until then, she’s a bodysnatcher living below the surface, every movement deliberate.

 

Now though, she furrows her eyebrows and juts her chin out in an attempt at a look of quiet defiance.

 

The woman shuffles a few of the papers in front of her before bringing her glasses back around to her nose and reads. “You’ve consistently scored exceptionally high on your MAP exams. Well above your grade level.”

 

The woman looks up then, leaning her forearms on the desk and searching for something on Jillian’s face. Jillian doesn’t know what so she stays stock still, eyes locked on the woman’s arms. She thinks about radial bones and torque and arms. Thinks about the robot stashed behind the dumpster and the modification she wants to try now. Organizes the muscles in her face into something as close to passive as she can manage, trying not to betray the burning curiosity that is bubbling it’s way up her neck to press behind her tongue.

 

“I spoke with your mother this morning. We think that you should be homeschooled, maybe even take some college courses, when you’re ready, of course. Would that be something you would like to do?”

 

Jillian doesn’t miss a beat before blurting out ‘yes!’. Brain and heart whirring with relief and elation and hope.

 

(.)

 

She studies on her own and with the tutors her mother hires, spending hours first at the public library and then at the University library nearby. The clerks smile to her, amused and then curious and then impressed, before actively discussing the more arduous books and journals she insists on tackling.

 

She relies less and less on the carefully curated catalogue of acceptable reactions, feels that pressure to conform in a less visceral way. By the time she actually begins courses at the University whose library she already knows so well, that wardrobe of countenance in her brain has started to collect dust. Because when you’re 15 and setting the curve in all of your engineering courses, there is no script. There is no sense in conforming. So she doesn’t, her hair and wardrobe following suit. The long flow of soft blonde curls is cropped off haphazardly at the chin, and she pulls the top half back away from her eyes whenever working in the lab or in her mother’s garage. Her clothes slowly change from the pastels that she thought helped her fit in as a child to a kaleidoscope of earthy tones more in line with the patterns Jillian saw in the dusty photographs of her mother’s youth.

 

She stops answering to her first name because it doesn’t seem to fit her anymore. It feels too small and too tight around her shoulders and neck, so she goes by her last name instead. Something about the cluster of consonants in the center remind her of the way her thoughts sometimes jam together, like a circuit flooded with current. A wonderful swell of multifarious concepts colliding to form something strange but alluring.

  


( . . _ . )

  


It’s two days after her 18th birthday when she meets Dr. Gorin.

 

It’s just before the mid morning lab sessions are scheduled to begin and Holtz is fumbling with her keys, attempting to lock up before her fellow lab advisor arrives to set up the stations for the first year engineering students. She had remained working in the lab the night before, soldering and re-soldering circuit boards for the power source of her latest prototype until she had fallen asleep, drool blossoming on the scrawled dimensions of her blueprints.

 

“Are you Jillian Holtzmann?”

 

Holtz jolts, dropping her keys to the ground before whipping around in the direction of the voice. Her eyes are red around the rims and there are bags below them sinking into her cheeks, but at this moment they are wide and panicked. Her advising professor had moved her to this particular lab tucked at the end of the hallway with the first years after the third fire she had set, saying that she was concurrently one of the brightest he had employed in his lab and the most expensive. She knows graduation is only a few months away but she thinks of all of the times her professors’ patience disappeared like sweat drying from evaporative cooling, leaving only salt. She doesn’t want to waste her third strike on something as trivial as sleep, let alone sleeping in an inappropriate place.

 

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” the voice again, a woman, stern and faintly impatient. “Are you or are you not Jillian Holtzmann?”

 

Holtz bends to pick up her keys, trying to mask the guilt of being caught with an overly chipper “Yep! Guilty!” She’ll have to work on those freudian slips, she thinks.

 

“Excellent. My name is Dr. Rebecca Gorin. As I understand, you’ve recently been accepted to the MIT Nuclear Science and Engineering graduate program. Correct?”

 

“Uh, yea… Is this about my lab application?” Holtz asks, turning fully to face the woman. She is standing rod straight, unsmiling, and Holtz can practically smell the cogency she exudes like a soft perfume.

 

Holtz frowns. She hadn’t heard back from Dr. Tagaki’s lab after sending the miniature sample of her neutron moderator in lieu of a formal application. _Technically_ it isn’t dangerous until the uranium is added, but the woman at the shipping center was _adamant_ that she couldn’t ship something so structurally similar to a ‘bomb’. Holtz had rolled her eyes and marched it over to the next closest center and with eyes blank, nose flared, and lips pressed into a line told the man behind the counter that it was a muffler. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

 

“An apt deduction. Dr. Tagaki found it to be... unprofessional and dangerous.”

 

Holtz’s shoulders and stomach drop in tandem.

 

“Fortunately for you, Dr. Tagaki is woefully incompetent. Tell me, did you design the device yourself?” Her tone isn’t disbelieving like all of her other professors, but more assertive like a statement rather than a question. As if she already knows the answer but feels it prudent to verify. Holtz takes in the frill of her collar, follows it down to where it’s tucked into a faded skirt. The edges are beginning to fray and Holtz thinks that this woman must wear it often, unconcerned with its erosion and anomalous style. Something hooks in Holtz gut and she thinks that maybe this woman, Dr. Gorin, is a kindred spirit. A fellow bodysnatcher skimming just close enough to the surface for Holtz to glimpse. She doesn’t want to hope, but she does.

 

“Yep! Yes! Indeed? I mean, I did, yes.” She’s bouncing almost imperceptibly on the balls of her feet now, excitement and nerves bubbling through her chest and down her arms to where she fidgets with the keys between her fingers. She sucks her lips between her teeth to keep from babbling on.

 

“Well, that is… impressive… Let’s get right to it. I would like to offer you a spot in my lab next semester. You don’t have to respond now, think it over. I will be giving a guest lecture this afternoon and then I’ll be flying back to Cambridge this even-”

 

“YES!” She really _had_ meant for it to come out at a reasonable volume but her brain had begun spinning and she thought about finally being able to work in a place that not only let her try to construct the conglomeration of ideas that she would scribble down on any available strip of paper before they ghosted away but would _encourage_ her and it just sort of rushed past the gateway of her lips.

 

Dr. Gorin blinks once before giving a sharp nod and saying with a tone of finality “We’ll be in touch then, Ms. Holtzmann.”

 

Holtz only waits until Dr. Gorin has rounded the corner at the end of the hallway before pumping both fists into the air, a loud ‘whoop’ echoing through the corridor.

 

( _ _ _ )

 

Holtz works seamlessly beside Dr. Gorin, ultimately staying to complete her Phd in Dr. Gorin’s lab despite being offered her own smaller one. Something about the stripped down, solely logical precision of Dr. Gorin makes Holtz feel grounded. As if Gorin is the polished copper to Holtz’s live wire, directing all of her loose electrons to a place that they can be harnessed, a conduit for that which cannot be articulated.

 

She wouldn’t say that she had fallen in love with Dr. Gorin, but she does love her. She loves the way that she can interpret the untidy spill of ideas that pour from Holtz and how she always responds thoughtfully. Never passing judgement when Holtz gets so excited that her words jumble together, or when she sets off explosions that force evacuations of the entire campus (the second time really _was_ an accident). It’s only ever encouragement from Dr. Gorin, and the occasional admonishment for Holtz’s disregard for lab safety rules (delivered half-heartedly).

 

Holtz loves her for her brain. Loves to think about the infinite synaptic connections beneath the skin and tissue and bone. She had spent two months conducting something of a secret experiment to prod at the limits of Gorin’s seemingly endless knowledge, popping off questions about anything she could think of at random, the more obscure the better, but gave up when Gorin answered everything she threw at her with a calm, succinct finality. Holtz was forced to conclude that the limit did not exist.

 

Holtz thinks this is the closest she will ever come to _love_. She had known with a staggering certainty about her attraction to women in the 6th grade. There was little fanfare and no tortured crush, just a sudden epiphany as she stood blinking into her locker. It came so easily to her. A revelation dropped from somewhere in the universe to rest nestled behind her ribcage. And that was that. She was homeschooled not long after and when she started university courses she was always so much younger than her peers. No one paid her any mind and she was more than happy to focus on school anyway. Love seemed a far off uncertainty. A compartmentalized block of time and space, like the fossils she collected as a girl, to be opened and revered at a later date. And she could wait.

 

Every now and then she would get a slow creeping itch to simply reach out and touch. Just touch and then be done. Like after long evenings during her first year at MIT, grading undergraduate papers, hunched over the metal desk in the shared engineering TA office. The long stretch of her fellow TA revealing a soft stomach and curving spine and lengthening neck. And the itch to discover the differences between the sensation of skin under her fingers and skin under her lips. How it would feel if both ran down the ridges of her throat. Would they make the same sound as a guiro? Could _she_ elicit that same parabolic tension of the spine?

 

The itch became an irritation at the same time that she was able to sneak into the local bars. And it was so easy to scratch it. She already possessed a strange magnetism of offbeat novelty and a cheshire smile and all that was needed to seal the mutually feelings-free and short term deal was a drink or two. She was always self-taught to some degree but this seemed more intuitive. The way her hands just swept over curves and planes and pulled at the threads that would unwind woman after woman. How she could use sure fingers and a soft mouth to pull moans from them like pulling a drawstring from its sheath, bunching up the muscles at first before they slackened bonelessly.

 

She never stayed afterward. Always quietly collected the garments strewn across the floor like a breadcrumb trail and left a sprawled and spent body, an unwound spool of thread heaped and heaving. She slept better knowing that when her eyes cracked open they wouldn’t find a closed off gaze with the blunted edges of chagrin swimming just below the surface.

 

The itch never felt quite like love. The bodies had always seemed so distant, separated from her heart by a faraday cage. And the crystallized admiration for Dr. Gorin that hummed constant in her chest never quite dipped down far enough. In a way, Holtz was happy that it didn’t. That she could keep Dr. Gorin this way indefinitely, encased in amber tangential from the messiness and the visceral hurricane of hormones and dopamine overdoses. It was schrodinger’s cat: alive and dead. Holtzmann’s love: liminal and infinite.

 

She often thinks of what the perfect woman for her would be like. Takes the pieces that she likes from other women and builds a chimera in her mind. A Frankenstein woman. One who is devastatingly smart and kind but snarky and sexy and maybe a little too up in her head so that she’ll push on doors that clearly say pull and it will only make Holtz smile and smile. She stays awake sometimes in that Frankenstein laboratory in her mind and hopes.

 

( . _ . )

 

She finishes her Phd and finds herself face to face with the unflinching void of her future. Holtz knows she won’t make it in elite academia where everything is smothered in affluence and free thinking is just a philosophical concept to muse over in a lecture hall. She got lucky with Dr. Gorin, who let every kernel of an idea she had blossom and bloom into an enigmatic device or a puff of smoke, depending on the day. Dr. Gorin who was always patient even when Holtz set their research back an entire day because she needed to make new safety glasses after hers had shattered in a small to medium sized poof. She’ll never find a perfect cocoon like their lab again, and the thought of using her skills in the private sector makes her shiver and cringe.  

 

So she drifts. For months she barters for places to sleep. Fixes cars and hot water heaters and computers in exchange for a few nights or a week on the couches of acquaintances, and then of friends of acquaintances. She eats whatever is packaged and can fit in her backpack, and tells her mother over the phone that she’s doing fine, don’t worry. She thinks that this is temporary anyway, like being pushed out of an airplane over a different country and parachuting to the ground. She doesn’t know when she’ll land and the wind shifts too often to calculate a trajectory, but once her feet hit the ground she knows she’ll orient herself, has the capacity to adapt.

 

( . )


	2. before the shift: part 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The second epoch of this story is centered around Holtz/Abby's friendship.  
> However, I realized today that this chapter was longer than I had intended, and I was extremely reluctant to break it into two parts.. But I did anyway. The good news: I will post the other half tomorrow or the day after. The bad news: you'll have to wait to meet Erin and Patty for a short while longer. I'm sorry. But I hope you all can continue to enjoy this version of Holtz's journey until then.
> 
> So here is part 1. It will establish Holtz/Abby friendship.  
> Part 2 will be posted soon and will move the plot up to where we meet Erin.
> 
> Side note: the pace is much slower from now on. The remaining chapters will cover shorter periods of time than the first chapter.

It’s early October and Holtz has been staying in NYC for two weeks on a floral couch belonging to a distant cousin she can only describe as diffident. She had helped him convert a small gasoline engine to run on natural gas and he thanked her profusely, insisting that he would never have been clever enough to do it himself, and offered his living room to her for however long she needed (he’d hardly be there anyway, he insisted). She didn’t have the heart to tell him she could have completed the task tied up in her sleep, and she really needed a place to shower, so she gave him a toothy grin and a wink and a “thanks, bub” before plopping gracelessly on the couch that has since begun to smell more like her shampoo and something singed and less like must and feet. 

 

She still feels adrift after months of restless travel. Can feel the ache in her bones from crashing on couches, more tossing and turning than sleep. And the fatigue in her muscles from treading, trying to keep her head above water. She finally understands all the ocean analogies associated with an untethered life, really does feel like she’s been battered at sea.

 

She still feels adrift but as if she’s floating in the opposite direction than she initially predicted. Flitting up into the atmosphere instead of gently falling toward the sure and steady pull of the planet’s core. She thinks of the astronauts currently calculating complex equations in the international space station. How the pooling of liquid is a function of gravity, so they don’t drool when they sleep. They just strap themselves down and slumber dry-mouthed and weightless 249 miles above the Earth. Holtz thinks she knows how that must feel, to be an anomaly of gravity, barely held in place and parched. Unsatiated. 

 

But once she settles in, Holtz finds that she loves the city. It has a hum that vibrates at a frequency low enough to be felt in her diaphragm, and is punctuated by a seemingly endless cache of enigmatic sounds. Holtz wonders if maybe it’s a code, a language she doesn’t speak yet but can’t wait to learn. She loves the shadows and smells and the  _ life _ bursting from every crevice. But what Holtz loves most about the city is the garbage. There is  _ so much _ garbage. Except it doesn’t look like garbage to her as her eyes dance over discarded scraps. Maybe it’s the way her goggles filter the light, but she sees something more like scattered and disassembled gadgets, hiding cleverly in plain sight. So she turns her evenings into hunts, prowling for items of ascending value, some of which she tries to pawn and the rest she fabricates into devices, which she sells, but later.

 

Each day she spends in the city she can feel a tug back toward the ground, imagines that it’s the city itself sending tentacled vines to twine and knot themselves around her ankles, tethering her from drifting away. Holtz hopes and hopes, whispers a small plea to every shrub and creeper she passes, that they will ground her, draw her voyage to an end. 

 

( _ )

 

Her hair has grown considerably since she left MIT, and she’s taken to sort of swooping it back, heaping it on the top and back of her head and pinning it there, but, you know, with purpose. It happened accidentally and in annoyance the first time after several strands refused to remain tucked behind her ears, falling to sway in front of her eyes as she leaned over the lip of a dumpster. She had tried and failed to blow the tresses laterally, puffing and jerking her head from side to side until she gave up and searched for a rubberband, still perched at the pelvis over the lip of the bin with her top half dangling inside it’s mouth. She reached back to pat her pockets but found only the alligator clips she’d picked up behind a hardware shop two blocks over. For one desperate moment she surveyed her options before grabbing at the strands and pinning them back precariously with the clips and diving back into the bin. She’d almost forgotten that she’d done it at all until she caught a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror after returning to the dimly lit apartment. 

 

The look is messy and strange and fulfills its function and she thinks it’s so deliciously odd and perfect that she decides to wear it that way everyday, tonight being no exception as she fastens back a loose strand with the proper pins she had purchased and sets off into the evening air. 

 

Her gaze shifts briefly to the sky, now ink black and hazy, before it drops again to her quarry and she strides purposefully around the side of a columned stone building. It’s newer than the neighboring structures, the marquee near it’s entrance touting the name of an institute that she doesn’t quite catch in her haste to escape the spindled arms of the street lights. Keith Hopkins Institute, maybe? Kendrick Haines? It’s inconsequential at the moment, and Holtz thinks a building by any name would sound just as sweet if it had a dumpster behind it like the one she rounds the corner and nearly walks headlong into. 

 

Her eyes pop as they flit from item to item, taking stock of the debris shrouded in the glow of a security light perched on the corner of the building. She immediately spots a sturdy looking industrial steel cart with a missing wheel, two blowtorches that she guesses just need a good cleaning, and what appears to be roughly half of the components to a small Van de Graaff accelerator. Can’t imagine what is hiding beneath.

 

She can feel the breeze swirl across her tongue as her jaw slackens in disbelief and she reaches out a finger to poke at the pile of equipment in front of her. Almost expects it to wisp away like smoke, a cruel mirage. But when her finger thumps firmly against metal she’s unable to stop her arms from shooting up, hips swinging back and forth in a victory dance. She thinks of divers and sunken treasure lolling amongst barnacles and seagrass on the ocean floor. Of the euphoric surprise that pirates must have felt after seizing a ship with rubies or gems or fine silks aboard. Her hips don’t stop swaying as she shimmies toward the dumpster and begins sifting the debris into piles. Keep. Leave. Where will I put this? Too heavy, come back for later. 

 

“Hey! Hey! You can’t be back here! Damnit, I told Darren we needed a fence, or a hedge…”

 

Holtz whips around to see a dark haired woman, short, arms overflowing with a stack of broken down cardboard boxes. She’s trying to push her glasses up her nose with her shoulder but the shift in her weight causes the cardboard to slip, inciting a cascade of flattened boxes to slide down her front and onto the pavement. Holtz tries to use the commotion to slowly back away and round the corner of the building but the woman’s head snaps up and she’s pointing at Holtz, stepping closer to her.

 

“Nope! No you don’t! You’re not going anywhere! This is private property, you know.” She pauses to reach into her pocket and pulls out a phone before mumbling “twice this week. Twice! I’m calling security. This is ridiculous.”

 

The woman brings the phone up to her ear with one hand while her other hand grips her hip impatiently. 

 

Several moments pass in silence. Holtz stands motionless, arms held up defensively in front of her. She could just make a run for it, knows she’s quick enough to outrun this woman, but something about her hooks Holtz’s interest. Her stern voice has no real edge and the line that her mouth is pressed into looks forced, unconvincing, as if Holtz is just a proxy for the thing that actually peeves her. Holtz thinks of her school counselor from years ago, admonishing her but only because her job title mandated that she should, her heart not really in it. She thinks she can see a shadow of her in this woman. Wants to stick around to test the hypothesis.

 

She cocks her head to the side curiously as the woman shifts her weight from foot to foot, waiting several long moments before jabbing her thumb onto the screen of her phone with a huff.

 

“Nobody answered?” Holtz says, scrunching her nose and holding back an amused smile.

 

“No. Is it so much to ask for a reasonable level of security around here?!” She throws her arms in the air, “what if I had been mugged? Or abducted?”

 

“Your organs could be harvested from your body in this very alley and where would, Darren was it? Darren in security? Where would Darren be? Playing bingo? Adopting a basset hound? Who knows!?” Holts says, arms moving around from in front of her chest to beside her shoulders, palms up in a shrug.

 

“Exactly! Thank you!” 

 

“Dudes, they’re the worst, am I right? Yeeuuhhgg.” Holtz’s hands drop to her pockets and she rolls onto the balls of her feet, not really knowing what to say, before falling back onto her heels with a thud. “Welp,” she says, popping her lips, “I guess I’ll be on my way-”

 

“Wait! No, hey! I’m sorry, but I still have to file a report about this.” She sounds less sure and softer than before. “What’s your name?”

 

Holtz pauses for a beat, eyes widening, before her usual retort to being caught springs from her mouth and she begins to slide her feet backwards.

 

“Désolé je ne parle pas anglais. Je suis navet. Wait, that’s not right…”

 

“Really? You were literally  _ just _ speaking English,” the woman says, crossing her arms and rolling her eyes knowingly. “And what was that last bit? Turnip? You’re a turnip?”

 

“Mmhmm. Born and raised.” 

 

“Right. Okay. And I’m queen of the capuchins! What are you even gonna do with all this stuff? Is that a Van de Graaff accelerator? No, its  _ half _ of one. Do you even know what that is?”

 

Holtz gasps at that, clutching her chest in mock offense. “What do I look like to you? An  _ ordinary _ ?” She looks utterly appalled. “If you  _ must _ know... I was going to modify it. I think I can reroute some pathways, speed up the electrical breakdown so the accelerating voltage is increased and then we’re well on our way to, pfffft, who knows, a beam maybe, if I can catalyze rapid depolarization… I just need to get my hands on a-”

 

“Wait wait wait…” The woman is waving her hands in front of her face, brows furrowed in confusion. “First, you look like a homeless person, that’s what you look like to me. Second, ordinary is not a noun. And third… who the fuck are you?!” 

 

“Oh my  _ good _ ness, where are my manners?” Holtz says in an exaggerated southern accent. She brushes her palms down the front of her grease stained overalls before stepping forward and extending her hand to the woman with a flourish. “Holtzmann. Doctor of the nuclear engineering variety. Handylady,  _ handsy _ lady, and glorious weirdo at your service.”

 

Holtz is shaking her hand firmly, with too much enthusiasm, her curls bouncing on top of her head. The woman just stares back at her, slack jawed. After several seconds she seems to compose herself before squinting her eyes and offering up a tentative “I’m Dr. Yates. Abby. I work here.”

 

“You  _ do _ ?” Holtz replies, finally dropping her hand with a smirk and a wink. She knows she’s taking a risk by feigning a rapport with this woman, but it’s easy and she can’t think of a single thing she could lose. Except her clean criminal record. And the equipment that keeps drawing her gaze. But she remembers the river of luck that has flowed through her life thus far and hopes that today isn’t the day it changes course or trickles to a halt. Her brain jerks to the effects of climate change on terrestrial water systems and she cringes, hopes her cosmic odds are not comparable.

 

“Yea,  _ asshole, _ ” Abby shoots back, but her lips are curling up into a smile and she lightly pushes Holtz’s shoulder and says “You can wipe that smug look off your face now. I haven’t forgotten you were back here dumpster diving like two minutes ago.”

 

“Yea, you’re not gonna, you know,” she holds her wrists out in front of her, miming being handcuffed. She’s still waiting for that moment, when the woman decides that Holtz isn’t charming but unnerving, a threat. She doesn’t  _ think _ she will, her eyes are too kind and her smile is too knowing. Like she knows that Holtz is harmless because she’s seen a hundred strange women just like her pass through this alleyway before. Holtz thinks of snap judgements and old children’s stories about fast friends and she  _ hopes _ . 

 

“Nah.” Abby tilts her head to the side, contemplating her words. She raises her finger to point at Holtz, “but I do have some questions.”

 

Holtz’s tension deflates, the air she didn’t realize she had been holding captive in her lungs rushes free and she drops her head back in relief. “Whew! You had me scared there for a second,” she says before squatting down to pick up a piece of the almost forgotten cardboard that is still sprawled out across the pavement. “Questions I can do. Ask uh-whay.”

 

Abby crouches down next to Holtz, wobbling for a moment before steadying herself with a hand on Holtz’s shoulder, and grabs at the cardboard alongside her. 

 

“Well, it’s only two questions really. Where did you get your Phd and do you believe in the paranormal?”

 

“MIT and not yet,” Holtz beams, intrigue and excitement prickling beneath her skin as the tether at her ankles tugs and tugs.

 

( . . . . )

 

Holtz and Abby go together like guanine and cytosine, an instant bond, and Holtz thinks that  _ this  _ is what having a real friend must feel like. She thinks of wavelengths and visible light and cones in the eye. About being on someone’s wavelength and seeing wavelengths as colors and how people who lack just one cone miss out on an entire section of the visible light spectrum. Wonders if maybe she had been missing something like a cone that she somehow found in Abby and is now able to see colors she’s never dreamed of. 

 

Abby gets her a job as her assistant in her lab at what Holtz discovers is the Kenneth P. Higgins Institute of Science and they work together not quite in harmony but in the achingly beautiful dissonance that Holtz craves in sound and thought. The kind of complimentary clash that defies expectation, melds the antithetical into a work of art and burrows beneath her skin, forcing goosebumps to rise in its wake. When Abby fills her in on all of her theories, Holtz drinks it up, wide eyed and chin resting in her palm. Her mind spins, distilling the barrage of ideas that consume her like a centrifuge, all of the different ways they can test and explore their expanding universe condensed into a messy pulp of possibilities. 

 

Holtz itches to push at the barriers of physics just to see if something pushes back. Hopes and hopes that maybe something will.

 

( . )

 

After two months of working in the lab with Abby, Holtz is able to rent a small studio nearby but doesn’t stay there most nights. Instead she finds herself tucked beneath the lab table that holds all of the equipment they’ve deemed ‘third priority’ several nights a week. She thinks that maybe the close proximity to her projects will result in a sharing of molecules, an atomic exchange. That if she breathes in deep, makes enough room in her lungs, or runs her hands along the crude edges of their framework with enough reverence that she’ll absorb their loose particles, microscopic messengers. She dreams of cellular communication and signaling and tin can secrets as she sleeps encompassed by her ideas both manifested and latent. 

 

“Just don’t let Darren see you in here in the middle of the night. He’s already on my case about Bennie having a key to the back entrance.” Abby says it like it’s a non issue, just another tick on their to-do list, and it makes Holtz’s heart twinge. Because Abby knows that her best ideas come late in the evening and are followed by a swift but short crash. 

 

Holtz feels strangely moved by Abby’s attentiveness in a way that confuses her, evokes a foreign prickly sensation behind her eyes, and she feels the tether around her ankles jerk again. Because she’s never been able to simply  _ exist _ beside another human before, not without stipulations and tradeoffs and wrapping cellophane over the corners of herself. Even Dr. Gorin couldn’t handle her in her concentrated form. Would allow music in the lab but only to a certain decibel and would draw the line at dancing. Even after Holtz explained kinetic learning and memory retrieval from the motor cortex, Gorin remained firm on the rule. But Abby knows. She may not be a bodysnatcher, she’s too at ease in her skin, but she can tell that Holtz is one. Can see when Holtz is holding back an idea that she thinks might be too insane. Just waits patiently with a faint smile for her to reel her thoughts back in, funnel them back through the sieve in her brain and out of her mouth in the most coherent way she can manage. Will pat Holtz on the shoulder to let her know she can dance unrestrained again after their colleague from upstairs drops by to borrow a blowtorch. Knows that once Holtz gets a concept rolling in her head she won’t stop to eat until she’s mapped out every step of production. 

 

The day that Holtz finds granola bars and tiny packages of candy taped to various tools on her work bench she marches up to Abby with no preamble and throws her arms around her from behind, giving a crushing squeeze before returning to her table without a word. The rest of the afternoon she smiles until her cheeks ache and ache.

 

What surprises Holtz the most is how much  _ fun _ it is with Abby. Abby, who puts on a front of annoyance when Bennie forgets to bring half of their lunch order and they have to wait until nearly dinner time before he ambles in with most of the other half. Who frowns almost condescendingly at their colleagues’ dumb questions and snaps impatiently at the employees of the hardware store they frequent when they try to offer her unsolicited advice. 

 

But Holtz has learned that the shortness and harsh refutal is just to keep people from looking too closely. Because Abby may take pride in her work and throw herself full tilt into their research, but she doesn’t like having to always  _ prove _ to others the validity of it all, and herself by extension. And Holtz knows more than anyone the exhaustion that accompanies that sort of substantiation. 

 

She feels a soft whisper of sadness constrict around her throat at the thought of the invisible Abby that only she can see. The Abby that barks out sharp laughs when Holtz narrates the conversation of strangers sitting two tables over at their go-to diner. Who exudes a soft affection toward Holtz, accentuated by a fierce loyalty that manifests as seething glares aimed at the strangers who stare or grimace at Holtz’s mismatched boots and too-big coveralls. 

 

Holtz doesn’t let on that she notices Abby’s protectiveness, just smiles to herself and secretly vows to be just as loyal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am not a physicist (or a writer for that matter). Biology is my thing, so let me know if I put something in here that offends physics as a discipline.  
> Also, just let me know what you like/hate in general.


	3. before the shift: part 2

( . . _ . )

 

“Hey Ab-a-dab! Have you seen my lucky hex key set?” Holtz is in the supply closet at the back of the lab, elbow deep in a bin filled to the brim with assorted hand tools that’s been pulled forward to rest on the edge of the shelf. 

 

It’s been just over a year since Abby found her snooping through the dumpster behind the building that currently employs them and her penchant for garbage repurposing has only escalated. After a particularly frantic morning three weeks prior, Abby had forced her to move any and all duplicate items to the back when her ‘no tool left behind’ policy for dumpster finds resulted in their work area being too cluttered to find the fire extinguisher. Holtz had complied begrudgingly, equally reluctant to: 1. part with being in close proximity to at least two socket wrenches at all times and 2. admit that once the lab space was eventually cleared out she found it a smidge easier to concentrate. And she really did need all the concentration she could muster now that they had started an admittedly amateur ghost stalking (Holtz’s description) enterprise in addition to their ongoing research.

 

“The one with the missing 7mm or the one attached to your belt loop?” Abby’s voice drifts in from out in the lab.

 

Holtz shoots a hand down to pat her side and then her back, surprised to find that there is indeed a hex key set dangling from the belt loop just above her back pocket. She runs her finger along its side, feeling the crescent shaped singe mark, a relic from a particularly nasty run in with a frayed cable. She pats the set fondly, the corners of her mouth drifting upward as a thought occurs to her and she calls out, “Why Abby, if I didn’t know any better I’d think you were ch-”

 

“Nope! Don’t even finish that sentence. I wasn’t checking out your ass, you weirdo.” The dismissal is punctuated by shuffling and the sound of a zipper closing. “Are you almost ready? We have to be at this house before nightfall to set up. We could finally see a class II tonight! Probably not though, this guy sounded like the antenna wasn’t picking up the signal, if you know what I mean...” There’s more shuffling and a muffled thud. “Oh, and I’m in charge of the camera tonight! I still have two hours of that weird finger puppet show from last time on my hard drive that I… I honestly don’t know how I’ll explain if anyone ever sees it…”

 

Holtz throws her head back and cackles. “How did you  _ sleep _ through that?! You had a starring role!” She pushes the bin of tools back to sit fully on the shelf before shooting over her shoulder toward the lab, “Such a graceful performance by the way, really moving.”

 

She takes a slight step back, eyes scanning the closet for any forgotten items, hands coming to rest on her hips when her elbow catches on a small box sitting precariously on the shelf at her side. She turns to grab it before it tumbles downward but only succeeds in grabbing onto the bottom, the top end pointed toward the ground, contents spilling across the floor.

 

“You okaaay.” Abby’s voice floats in after a moment, the concern in her tone blatantly unconvincing. “I’ve told you like a hundred times to use the step ladder. To be honest, I’m surprised it’s taken you this long to fall off one of those shelves.”

 

Holtz rolls her eyes, “I didn’t fall o-...” she freezes. It takes her a few seconds before her brain fully registers the sight at her feet. A picture of Abby, with wild hair and wide rimmed glasses, and a woman Holtz doesn’t recognize staring  _ intensely _ up from the back cover of a glossy book that Holtz has never seen before. For a beat she thinks that maybe it’s a joke, a vestige of an elaborate prank that never came to fruition and her head recoils slightly in impressed amusement. Because it’s very convincing, even has a fake publishing firm in tiny print in the bottom corner and Holtz tilts her head to make out the name. 

 

She can feel the amused smile from moments before slowly melt into a confused frown, deep furrows rippling her brow as recognition blooms behind her ribs. The publishing company is not fake but of moderate acclaim, and she looks back to the photo. Notices the length of Abby’s hair and lack of tiny fractures in the skin around her eyes.

 

Holtz racks her brain backward and forward, imagines her memories as an office stuffed with files that she’s currently ransacking, desks upended and papers flying. Can’t seem to find any reference to the book that sits taunting her from the floor. She nudges it with the toe of her boot, not wanting to touch it but needing to verify that it is indeed a solid form and not a trick of the light or her eyes or her brain that continues to scramble for any information on its existence. 

 

“Um. Hey, Abs… You wanna come tell me what I’m lookin’ at here?”

 

She hears Abby’s footsteps approaching. “What!? Is it another dead rat? We’re not keeping it this time, I don’t care what you say about decomposition experiments…” Her voice trails off as she rounds the corner into the supply closet, eyes falling to the book on the ground at Holtz’s feet.

 

Abby’s eyes shoot up to Holtz’s, a mix of panic and irritation fighting below the surface. She scrambles to grab the book, tucking it under her arm and bringing a finger up to point at Holtz’s face. 

 

“Not a word. This didn’t happen. You saw nothing.” She turns on her heel and briskly walks out of the supply closet.

 

“But Aaaabby…” Holtz is not about to let this go. She tosses the now empty box still clutched in her hands over her shoulder and follows Abby into the lab. “You wrote a book! A BOOK, Abs. With another lady.” She’s right on Abby’s heels as Abby winds through the work benches, trying to put some distance between them. “I mean I know you’ve written  _ articles, _ for science journals, but… you wrote a b-”

 

“If you say book again, I swear-”

 

“And it’s not even an ebook, it’s a  _ hardcover _ !”

 

Abby stalls before slowly turning to face Holtz, hand rising to nestle beneath her glasses, pinching the bridge of her nose with a soft sigh. The book is still tucked beneath her arm as if she’s hiding it from view but without being so dramatic as to put it behind her back. She inhales slowly, changing tact as her frown gives way to a deliberate front of passivity. 

 

“I wrote a book.” Abby flicks her hand through the air dismissively.

 

“Yes. It’s there,” Holtz points. “That one.” She is trying  _ so hard _ to be patient. Shoves her hands into her pockets to keep them from fidgeting.

 

Abby starts again. “I wrote a book with my best friend.  _ EX _ best friend. She ruins lives so, naturally we are no longer on speaking terms. But,  _ before _ that we wrote a book tog-”

 

“You keep saying book…” Holtz pipes, raising her pointer finger meekly in front of her shoulder.

 

Abby huffs, arms crossing over her chest and eyebrows shooting up impatiently.

 

“Well, you told me to quit saying it. I thought those were the rules,” Holtz’s arms come up defensively in a shrug and the corners of her lips twitch.

 

“Can I finish? Are you gonna let me finish my story?”

 

Holtz sucks her lips between her teeth, shoves her hands back into her pockets and nods.

 

“My former best friend and current succubus and I wrote a  _ book _ ,” she looks pointedly at Holtz (she so desperately wants to comment, audibly gulps back her retort) before continuing, “then she bailed on me. The rest is history. The end. We’re leaving now. Grab your shit.”

 

Abby strides toward their small pile of equipment that is sitting packed and ready to go at the end of the lab table by the door. Holtz’s gaze follows her and she leans her head forward expectantly, eyebrows inching upward. She waits a few moments. “...Aaaand?”

 

“And what? I said ‘the end’. That’s it. We wrote a book. Now we’re not friends. What’s so hard to understand?” She rounds the end of the lab table, arm already threading through the strap of a bulky duffel bag before heaving it up to rest on her shoulder.

 

“But... who is she? What happened? Is she alive? What did you write about? Is it banned from schools in the south? What am I saying,  _ of course _ it is. When did you write it? Why didn’t you tell me?” Holtz’s hands had been gesticulating wildly until the last question and her shoulders fall almost imperceptibly. She thinks about secrets and the uncomfortable pressure of burying things deep inside her chest and she can’t help but feel a sting that Abby had kept something like this from her. Something this substantial that she must have been feeling pressing and pressing on the inside of her sternum. 

 

Holtz thinks then, with a swoop in her gut, that maybe it was her or rather something she lacks, a hole in the place where an emotional repository should be, that kept Abby from entrusting her with something so paramount. Or maybe it’s her hands, too shaky and erratic, that make Abby wary. Make her feel like she can’t whisper the delicate parts of herself into the cup of her palm and pass it to Holtz for fear that she’ll be careless, let it fall to the floor heedless of its value. Something squeezes at the top of Holtz’s throat and her eyes drop to her fingers as they pluck at the corners of her vest nervously.

 

Abby catches the change in her, she always does, and her face softens. She returns the duffel to the table with a soft sigh. 

 

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Holtz. I just… I just don’t want to talk about it right now. But… later, okay? I promise.” Her brows are scrunched in the center and she’s almost pleading so Holtz just nods.

 

“Okay, okay. Later.” She pauses, a small smile creeping along her lips, before perking up. “C’mon. Lez go!” She sweeps her arms toward the door. “We need to stop and get snacks. I almost died last time.  _ Died _ , Abby, of  _ hunger _ . I could’ve turned into a ghost, and then what? You’d be trying to catch  _ me _ on camera.” Holtz singsongs the last bit and shimmies her shoulders suggestively, trying to break the tension with facetiousness and Abby tentatively returns her small smile from before. 

 

Holtz waits until Abby turns away to grab the duffel again before setting an internal timer, begins counting down the seconds until she thinks it will be okay to ask about it again. 

 

They gather up the rest of their equipment and she catches Abby stuffing the book haphazardly under a pile of loose papers on her desk out of the corner of her eye. She definitely  _ doesn’t _ begin drafting the plans for a book heist as they flick out the lights to the lab and head out for the night. 

 

( . _ )

 

Abby tells her the whole story three weeks later, every dirty detail, over a few rounds of beers at the bar they talk about grabbing drinks at more often than they actually go to. 

 

Abby tells her, but not before Holtz switches the book out with a decoy, slipping the glossy cover around a tugboat manual of roughly the same size that she just happened to have in her stack of stolen library books, and sliding it back into it’s place beneath the papers on Abby’s desk. She  feels a drop of guilt at going behind Abby’s back but it barely ripples the surface of the sea of curiosity that’s been swelling within her since she learned of it’s existence. 

 

It takes her two nights to read it because the science is complex, and Holtz would be surprised at how  _ good _ it is if she didn’t know Abby as well as she does. But she can hear another voice in the pages as she reads and that voice haunts her. It isn’t like Abby’s voice, concise and compelling, but more fluid and subtle, almost lyrical like the prose that Holtz only skimmed in school but wishes she’d paid more attention to now as she reads and rereads passages. The voice speaks directly to a tiny place inside of Holtz that she didn’t even know existed before this and it  _ gnaws _ at her. Nestles into the base of her spine and pulses, a parasitic beacon, an ultrasonic song echoing around her tendons and vessels. 

 

Holtz  _ knows _ she should hate this woman, should write her off without a second thought. But somehow she finds that she just can’t, maybe lacks a regulating mechanism or the ‘hate by proxy’ synaptic route that seems compulsory for modern friendships, though she gives it a token effort anyway. Lies on her back in the dark beside her lab table after Abby leaves, knees bent and hands pressing at her ribs. Tries to muffle the reverberations of a voice she’s never actually heard but can feel resonating in the cavity of her chest. She hopes that if she can construct a facade, an exoskeleton of antagonism, that maybe it will seep through her skin, change her from the outside in. She thinks of balms and chitinous shells and transdermal pathways as she watches the lights from outside the lab windows dance across the ceiling. 

 

That night at the bar, Holtz convinces Abby to make the book available for sale again. 

 

“I mean, seriously. Forget that lady. You could do this thing, I’ve read about it, it seems really cool, where you take something you make and,” she twirls her pointer finger upwards toward Abby’s face, “like alchemy, turn it into  _ money _ !” Holtz raises both hands above her head in mock amazement, a small splash of beer careening over the rim of her glass and dribbling down her fingers. Abby snorts, rolling her eyes. “Its  _ really _ good, Abs. I’m serious, you’re like a word-witch,” she says before licking the liquid from her fingers gracelessly, still gripping the glass. 

 

Abby squints at her suspiciously. “How would you know if it’s any good...?”

 

Holtz’s eyes bulge and her nose flares dramatically.

 

“I  _ knew it _ ! I knew you wouldn’t be able to leave it alone. You little shit.” Abby’s smiling as she shakes her head.

 

Holtz shrugs her shoulders and rolls her eyes toward the ceiling in faux innocence. “Holtzy sorry,” she mumbles but Abby sees through the charade, slapping her shoulder. 

 

“You’re the worst,” she says, but she’s laughing loud so Holtz laughs too. 

 

“But really, Abs. We could bring in a little…” Holtz rubs her thumb against the tips of her fingers and wiggles her eyebrows suggestively. “Maybe upgrade some of the equipment. I know I said I’d fix the voice recorder but…” She rolls her eyes and bobs her head from side to side before shrugging noncommittally, “it’s gutted. I would say I’m sorry? But I’m not. I like our new alarm systemohmygodAbby I just thought of something a mini fridge!!” She slaps her hands down on the table, mouth open in excitement. “Or an iguana! Wait, no. Too much radiation…”  She pauses, a small hiccup bubbling past her lips. Abby giggles at that, and Holtz can’t help but grin at her in return. “C’mon! Think about it. It’s a win-win-win!” 

 

“Fine! Fuck it! Let’s do it!” Abby lifts her glass in the air near Holtz’s face in what is probably supposed to be a salute of some sort before bringing it back down a bit too fast, slamming it on the table and mumbling a “whoops” with a watery smile.  

 

( . _ . . )

 

It’s a Thursday in late April, just over three months after Abby lists the book on her Amazon page. Exactly eight people have ordered a copy, although one was returned after the buyer opened it and realized that it was not a quote ‘guide manual for making ghosts from one’s past into literal figures again’. How they came to be under that impression in the first place, Holtz thinks she  _ could _ suss out if she wanted to but doesn’t. Just laughs and places the returned copy on top of the display they have set up next to the door of the lab. Abby says that it’s there in case any of their colleagues or the odd wandering student want to purchase a copy, but Holtz suspects it’s more of an exposure therapy technique for Abby. Because she still has trouble hiding the small frown that finds its way to her face every time she sees the book propped by the door like a harbinger of her grief, a tangible dejection. Maybe she thinks that seeing it every day will ease the sting. Holtz hopes that it does. 

 

She knows that it’s a Thursday because she’s waiting for their bi-weekly wonton soup to arrive before they head out to talk to a client when her entire universe begins to shift. She can almost feel the passing of the baton from the old era to the new, later thinks that maybe geologists of the future will be able to look back at the sedimentary rocks from this time and point their fingers to the boundary line of this day. The before and the after etched into the Earth’s surface. 

 

Holtz knows it’s a Thursday because when she sees a flurry of movement in her periphery she expects to look up and see Bennie ambling into the lab. Instead she short circuits, because the blur of red isn’t Bennie’s beanie but brownish hair that flashes tones of copper as it passes under the light.

 

Holtz doesn’t really know anything anymore at this moment, has become inexplicably frozen as the voice that she’s heard only in her head resounds and reverberates through the lab and through her sternum.

 

“What the  _ hell _ , Abby!”

  
( .  _ . . ) 


	4. before the fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! I meant to post this last week but I went out of town abruptly (Chicago, you were lovely) and I had limited access to this, so here we are. Anyway, this is a liminal chapter in which Holtz finds herself bewildered and conflicted at the appearance of Erin. As one does in these situations. 
> 
> Side note: I recently realized I had been spelling Bennie's name incorrectly, so I apologize and will fix it in previous chapters.

( . )

 

An alarm bell rings, a shrill chime echoing in the distance and Holtz wonders faintly if she should move, investigate the source of the sound. Except her limbs don’t respond. Just hang suspended in the syrupy thick serenity of surprise for moments that stretch and bend for far longer than they should, while the blowtorch in her hand burns and burns. She wonders briefly if the insects that found themselves immersed in amber felt the same vacuous shock or nothing at all as she vaguely registers movement across the lab through the honey tint of her glasses.

 

Abby’s voice floats to her from across the lab, and for a millisecond Holtz doesn’t understand why it sounds so agitated, before it’s interrupted by a thought bubbling up through the resin currently enveloping her senses.  _ She doesn’t have safety alarms in the lab _ . Had to disable them after they seemed to be going off far more than not. The only alert system they have is wired through her speakers, set to play Debussy whenever the staff elevator reaches their floor. 

 

Something in her snaps, awareness flooding back and she realizes that the peal must have been coming from somewhere in the corner of her brain, a failsafe she wasn’t aware she had set. She had run countless simulations in her mind, different iterations of the events that may or may not occur if Erin were to ever appear in the lab. Some of them were outrageous, ended in shouts and equipment flying through the lab and fiery explosions. Others were subdued and underwhelming, no more than curt exchanges. But all of them were blurry, indistinct. A stark contrast to the scene playing out at this moment before her and she grips the table with her free hand, wholly absorbed.

 

“Oh, I’m  _ sorry _ . Did my life’s work  _ inconvenience _ you?”

 

“This isn’t just about you. This is my life too! I’m up for tenure, Abby. Do you know how  _ hard _ I’ve worked to even be  _ considered _ ? And this looks… This looks bad, for me.”

 

“Oh, okay. I see. You run off to  _ Columbia _ and suddenly, huh, wow an entire period of your life just, poof! Disappears! That’s just bad physics, Erin. I’m surprised they even hired you at such a reputable institution-”

 

“Oh, c’mon Abby. You  _ know _ what this looks like to our field! We’re not 28 anymore. I did what I had to do. Oh god... the asses. I kissed so many asses...”

 

Her eyes are beginning to prickle but Holtz doesn’t blink, doesn’t want to miss a beat of the barbed exchange unfolding before her.

 

She knows she shouldn’t be but she’s  _ excited _ , hungry, wants to take in every data point about this elusive woman and store it alongside the file she’s already tentatively created for her in her brain. Can still feel Erin’s words hum through the loose connective tissue behind her ribs and knows that they are only a fraction of what must be billowing below the surface of this woman. A sliver of light glimmering through a pinhole that Holtz wants so desperately to place her eye up close to, peer into the nebulous expanse that she just knows swirls beneath her skin.  

 

And for some cosmic reason she’s been given a chance to do just that. Because Erin is here in the flesh, a living breathing organism standing in their lab, and Holtz would be remiss if she were to look away, so she doesn’t. Instead notes every frustrated shift in weight, how it changes the alignment of her spine just slightly. Tracks the hands that wave pointedly through the air when not gripping tightly around a tweed clad hip, slender fingers paling at blown glass joints. Watches the cords that flutter beneath the skin of her neck, follows them down to where they anchor the tense muscles of her shoulders, pulling them taught at the center. 

 

And she doesn’t mean to, is even a bit surprised that for a split second she feels something pang low in her gut. A flash, quick and hot like a strip of ignited magnesium and her fingers twitch as an image pops into her mind unbidden. She thinks of running the pads of her fingers down the nape of Erin’s neck, dipping between her shoulders just to see if the muscles will melt or shiver in their wake. Wonders if nails scraped along her spine would draw her head back like a lever, an anatomical mechanism for revealing the long column of her throat, exposing the muffled drum of a pulse that would stammer and swell if her lips were to graze the soft dip beneath her jaw.  

 

Holtz clamps her eyes shut, eyelids abrasive as sandpaper, and she shoves the thought from her mind. Tamps it down and locks it away. Because admiration of the mind is one thing, and it toes the line of loyalty as it is. But anything beyond would undermine her only real friendship, destroy the only person who truly understands her, and Holtz can think of nothing worse than discarding something so valuable. So she shifts her focus, concentrates on the timbre and cadence of the voices instead.

 

“What you  _ had _ to do? You  _ had _ to abandon me and all of our work? Our baby-”

 

“Uuuhh, should I leave, or…?” Three sets of eyes snap over to the door where Bennie is poised mid-step.

 

“Oh, hey Bennie! Perfect timing! Don’t mind the sea hag, she was just on her way out.” Abby crosses the lab then, reaching for the stack of bills that sit on the edge of her desk before walking back to hand them to Bennie. 

 

He grabs them and hands over the rumpled take out bag. “You know, you really shouldn’t leave infants unattended,” he scrunches his nose patronizingly and Abby lets out a clipped laugh before pushing him gently toward the door.

 

“Yea, I’ll take childrearing advice from you when you can put the contents of a short list into a bag without screwing it up.”

 

Bennie just shrugs halfheartedly and heads for the door, shoots a “good luck with your water magic or whatever,” over his shoulder to Erin before disappearing into the hallway. 

 

“Very mature, Abby.” Erin has both hands firmly on her hips, tone clipped in annoyance. 

 

“HA! Mature!” Abby turns away, back facing Erin as she walks to the opposite end of the lab, “You’d know all about that!” Her voice trails off as she rounds the corner behind a tall shelving unit stuffed precariously with miscellaneous equipment. 

 

Erin huffs and crosses her arms. She still hasn’t seen Holtz sitting there, but they’re alone now and Holtz is  _ buzzing _ to break the silence that has fallen over the lab like a film. 

 

“You carry a lot of tension in your shoulders.” 

 

Erin jumps, obviously startled by the presence of another person, and the part of Holtz that wants to support Abby is pleased by the reaction. She puts on her best enigmatic smile as Erin whips around toward the sound of her voice. 

 

“Oh! Umm…Hi?” Erin shifts her weight, flustered and Holtz is torn. She wants to find satisfaction in her discomfort, for Abby’s sake, but she really just finds it deeply adorable and the corners of her mouth twitch up just a fraction. Holtz clambers to her feet and switches off the blowtorch in one swift motion that she knows is too abrupt but she just wants to see how this woman will react. Wants to tip her just a little off balance to see if she swings back to center or topples over. Erin doesn’t move, only frowns slightly, so Holtz advances toward her, arm extended in introduction.

 

“Jillian Holtzmann. Long time listener, first time caller.”

 

“Uhh…” Erin grabs her hand and cocks her head to the side, brow furrowed.   
  


“I’ve heard... truly appalling things about you.” Holtz’s lips curl into her best cheshire smile and she is  _ delighted _ when she sees the words sink in and Erin simply rolls her eyes in response. She makes a note in her mental file: responds well to light provocation, indicative of healthy sense of humor. Explore further.

 

“Don’t touch her Holtzmann! She has a genetic disease that crushes dreams and destroys friendships.” Abby is walking toward them, wonton soup in one hand and an eggroll extended out to Holtz in the other. Holtz drops Erin’s hand and grabs the eggroll from Abby without breaking her gaze from Erin, immediately shoving half of it into her mouth. She shoots Erin a wink and is rewarded with the most delicious mixture of confusion, disgust, and veiled amusement.

 

Erin turns back to Abby, “Ha. Ha. You’re full of zingers today.” She drums her pointer fingers through the air in Abby’s direction in what Holtz thinks is meant to make her appear at ease, chill, but her shoulders are still too tight and the motion looks stunted and awkward. Holtz’s eyebrows shoot up as she chews, unable to hide her amusement at the gesture, before Erin drops her hands back to her hips and continues, “But this is serious. I need you to take the book down. Now.”

 

“Hmm, let me think about it… Nope. Not happening.” Abby pops a wonton into her mouth.

 

A low exasperated grunt slips from Erin as she stretches her neck, head rolling in a slow arc. She seems to take in a bit more of her surroundings, pausing for a moment before throwing her arms out, indicating to the lab around them. “What do you guys even do here?”

 

“I’m so glad you asked! We do a little bit of none of your busin-”

 

“We hunt ghosts.” Abby’s head snaps over to Holtz who simply shrugs. She wants to see how Erin will react. Because she knows what it’s like to hide the parts of herself that draw too much attention, knows that they are still lurking under the skin no matter how long they have to wait, coiled and writhing, to breach the surface again. Erin had written so passionately and definitively and that isn’t something that just disappears, doesn’t desiccate and decay like a neglected houseplant. And Holtz would bet her entire hand tool collection that Erin keeps that small part of herself that wrote the book with Abby polished and groomed, nestled neatly between the folds in the corner of her mind. 

 

“You… hunt ghosts…” Erin says it slowly and Holtz can tell she’s trying to mask her curiosity under a layer of condescension. Can practically see all of the questions Erin wants to ask them about their work swimming behind her eyes and in the twitch at the corner of her lips, but she catches herself and forces a scoff. “No you don’t. That’s ridiculous.  _ Very _ funny, guys.” 

 

“Actually, we do. And as a matter of fact, we were just about to go talk to a  _ ridiculous _ client about a  _ ridiculous _ class III. So if you don’t mind…” Abby makes a shooing motion at Erin with her hand before turning to grab the lid to her soup container. 

 

“Wait. A class III? I mean, assuming the psychokinetic energy is strong enough to accelerate ionization you could have a corporeal-” Erin says it quickly, seems to blurt it out before she can stop it, and when she does catch herself it’s too late and she grimaces. Holtz’s eyes light up emphatically, the corners of her mouth struggling to hold back a smug smile, and she can’t stop the nearly imperceptible shimmy that escapes from her internal victory dance.

 

“Well, well. Look who’s pretending to give a shit!” Abby drops her soup container onto the table unceremoniously before heading toward their cache of equipment near the door. “C’mon, Holtz. We better lock up. I’ve read that tweed skirt-suits are positively correlated with untrustworthiness.” 

 

Abby sends a pointed look to Erin before angling her body away from her. She looks to Holtz, eyes slightly panicked and face scrunched in a cringe and mouths  _ “I don’t know what I’m saying”. _ Holtz winces sympathetically, mouths  _ “I don’t think she noticed” _ and gives a tiny thumbs up as Abby swings the strap of her bag over her shoulder and turns toward the door. 

 

Holtz is left standing alone beside Erin for several moments. There’s a tug of war raging between her burning curiosity and the conventions of female camaraderie and she really doesn’t want to choose between the two. She knows which  _ should _ win but her curiosity is the reigning champion, has yet to be defeated by any type of social norm... 

 

Erin sighs dejectedly at Abby’s words and Holtz thinks of the dulcet satisfaction of peeling away at layers of wallpaper or artichokes or the insulation around copper wires. Can’t tamp down the compulsion to discover what’s lurking under Erin’s rigid veneer. Is it more layers, but softer, like the inside of a flower bud, velvet petals pressed and waiting to bloom? Or an echoing labyrinth with more walls and locks, like the chambered septa of a nautilus shell? Her curiosity tugs, any remaining opposition falling away and a manic grin blooms from the center of her lips. 

 

Erin looks over to her then, eyes searching desperately for a modicum of support as Holtz slinks around the lab table to join Abby, gathering her jacket and the bulky duffel bag. Holtz just wiggles her eyebrows suggestively and jerks her head toward the door, hopes that Erin will pick up on the invitation in the gesture. 

 

( _ . . _ )

 

Erin tags along tentatively behind Abby and Holtz, caught somewhere between Abby’s frowns and dismissive quips, Holtz’s eager and encouraging gestures, and what Holtz can only assume is her own unquenchable curiosity. 

 

Once they set up inside the client’s house, Abby squints suspiciously at Holtz. There’s a silent question in her eyes that Holtz isn’t ready to answer, so she just shrugs and ambles away to record indiscriminate features around the first floor with the video camera. Stays out of Abby’s way. Because Abby hasn’t explicitly  _ told _ Erin to leave yet, and Holtz wants to keep collecting data on her from her periphery and occasionally from behind the guise of her video documenting. 

 

Holtz is filming the dusty contents of an antique armoire when they see it. The most beautifully indescribable configuration of energy and light, and she would never have imagined in her wildest dreams that this would be what all of their theories and calculations would actually look like manifested. She thinks back on every word she’s ever read about the flow of electrically conducting fluids and electromagnetic fields and for the first time in recent memory can’t summon a reference to compare the experience to. Is unable to recall a single plasma or liquid metal that could hold a candle to the pure radiance of the form before her. 

 

They see it and they feel it crackling through the air around them like a current and they capture it on camera and Holtz is completely awestruck. First by the ethereal apparition, and then by Erin. Because Erin is the one to step audaciously toward the ghost, reaching out first physically with her hand in an attempt to touch, and then verbally, coaxing it toward her with a gentleness that surprises Holtz. She hears Abby’s PKE meter whirring at a rate that she didn’t think it was capable of achieving but she doesn’t look away from Erin and the spectre. Can’t look away. Feels something squeeze behind her sternum while her heart pounds and pounds, and it’s hard to tell which part of the events unfolding before her is more exhilarating, the ghost or the way that Erin approaches it with such reverence. 

 

Erin turns, bending her upper half back for a split second, eyes locking with Holtz just to make sure that the camera is trained on them and Holtz gives a small nod, heart stuttering. But as Erin straightens, the form in front of her shifts and she’s met with an alarming amount of a substance that Holtz can only describe as slimy and snot-like before it bolts from the now stagnant and silent room. 

 

Holtz doesn’t really think that it’s  _ funny _ , she will later after the initial shock subsides, but at this moment she can’t contain the laughter that bubbles up from somewhere deep in her chest. Because this is  _ bonkers _ . They just saw a ghost after  _ years _ of meticulous study and searching and it emitted a substance that they hadn’t even theorized as  _ possible _ onto a woman that Holtz never thought she’d ever share the same air with let alone be completely enthralled by in the span of a day and Holtz is struggling to process the high volume of information that is whirring through her prefrontal cortex. 

 

She wipes a droplet of slime from her cheek and rolls it between her fingers, thinks that this must have been the feeling of elation that Van Leeuwenhoek had when he peered through his microscope for the first time, catching a glimpse of the vast world that lay intertwined but just out of sight of our own. So she laughs because she doesn’t know what else to do, doesn’t know how else to process the euphoria that is singing through her veins. 

 

Erin stands unmoving for several moments, completely doused and dripping, before slowly turning to face Holtz and Abby, who is barely restraining a giggle of her own. And then she laughs too. A soft and disbelieving tittering at first that gives way to something more jubilant and hysterical as she paws at the slime that oozes down her face. 

 

( . . )

 

Erin shows up to their lab the next day. And the day after that. Every day, actually, for three weeks. She stops by after her afternoon classes, brimming with ideas and equations and an excitement that radiates from her like an aura.

 

Abby is unenthusiastic about her presence for the first couple of days, remaining cordial while Erin is in the lab but complaining to Holtz after she leaves.

 

“Can you believe her? The gall on that one.” Abby says after Erin leaves the second day. “Oh,  _ now _ she’s not too good for all of this,” She waves her hand around indicating to the lab, “now that we have verifiable data.”  

 

Holtz just hums noncommittally, a screwdriver perched between her teeth as she tinkers with the wiring harness on her new prototype. She doesn’t want Abby to know how much she enjoys having Erin around. That her equation that is still scrawled on the whiteboard across the lab catalyzed a breakthrough in Holtz’s device, has revolutionized her design for the hollow beam laser in a way that she would never have thought to try otherwise. Or that Erin’s meticulous eye for detail has already led them to a promising hypothesis for what the slime’s (they now call it ectoplasm at Abby’s behest) function is. Not to mention she was the only one who thought to collect a sample before they all painstakingly scrubbed the substance from their shoes (and Erin’s hair) under the small safety shower at the back of the lab. 

 

She definitely doesn’t want Abby to know that she likes the way Erin has softened over the past two days, accepting Abby’s surliness as if it’s her penance with a soft and seemingly unending patience. Or the way her brow furrows and she pulls the corner of her lip into her mouth when she’s concentrating, hair falling to shroud her face as she scrawls figures and equations that are so beautifully complex into the margins of Holtz’s design notes while Holtz just watches in awe. 

 

Holtz refuses to interpret for herself, let alone tell Abby about the effervescent commotion that roils in her stomach when Erin sends her a look of unsettled amusement as Holtz dances and lip syncs into a live wire or her soldering iron. Or the fluttering in her chest that follows when Erin briefly joins in with a buoyant smile and a jerky shimmy of her own. 

 

So she reaches for a different screwdriver to fasten down the bracket she’s holding, hoping the one that is still clenched between her teeth will muffle any wayward slips. 

 

“And did you hear her name-drop Brian Greene today?  _ Oh, I talked about that with  _ Brian _ over a light lunch and a quiet stroll through campus _ .” Her voice is pitched up in an exaggeratedly girlish tone and Holtz looks up at her, cocks an eyebrow. “Okay, I know that’s not  _ exactly _ what she said. But we get it! You’re chummy with famous scientists. I just think it’s a little pretentious, that’s all I’m saying.” she says, raising her hands in front of of her defensively. 

 

Holtz reaches to remove the screwdriver from her mouth and sighs, wincing as she wipes the short string of slobber that accompanies the hand tool on the front of her shirt. 

 

“I mean, yea, it was a liiiitle pretentious,” she pinches her thumb and forefinger together and holds them in front of her face for a moment. She’s hyper aware of her body, knows Abby can read her thoughts in her gestures, so she tries to deflect the meaning in her words with her movements, making an okay sign and pressing one eye to the circle created by her fingers before continuing, “but it seems like she’s trying? To make up for everything? A little?” She drops her hand and busies it with the project in front of her again, avoiding Abby’s eyes. “Maybe we should, ya know, give her a break. Break bread. Maybe make an omelet.” She mimes breaking an egg, knows she’s failing at burying the lede and puffs out her cheeks halfheartedly.

 

“Oh really? And this is your expert opinion based on the three days you’ve known her.”

 

“I’m just saying. She may be a succubus like you said, but I can think of ten waaay worse ways to die just off the top of my head. Waterboarding, ant attack, acid-”

 

“Okay, okay. I’ve heard your death list before. It’s worryingly specific.” Abby snorts. 

 

Holtz finishes fastening the last screw into the bracket with a flourish. “And it wouldn’t be  _ awful _ to have an extra brain lying around. Or an extra set of eyes. Or a set of legs.”

 

Abby squints at her last word, head cocked in suspicion.

 

“To help carry equipment!” Holtz blinks, the picture of innocence, before dropping the screwdriver onto the table with a clatter. “And you have to admit, she has a knack for all of this.”  

 

Abby sighs. “Yea, I guess you’re right. But maybe from now on we’ll talk about her as a complete…” she waves her hands in front of her in a circular motion, “person, not just disembodied parts. It’s creepy. And I think you know that.”

 

Holtz’s eyes light up and she opens her mouth to speak but Abby cuts her off, hand held up to stop whatever is about to come out of Holtz’s mouth.

 

“No! For the last time, no cadavers or parts of cadavers allowed in this lab! I can’t believe I’ve had to say that more than once.” 

 

“Uhhlright.” Holtz rolls her eyes and nods begrudgingly. 

 

But Abby doesn’t complain about Erin again and Holtz spends the rest of the evening thinking of scrawled equations and woven wool and pheomelanin pigments. Tries to ignore the hope that flutters in her gut. 

  
( . . . )

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter brings us Erin as a full member of the team. Holtz is consumed. And the beat goes on.  
> Also: this is still a parallel universe but I wanted the Erin/Holtz meeting to be very close to canon. Other events and timelines won't follow as closely.


	5. before the burn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I decided to revert to a wallflower reader last week and wait to post this chapter in favor of enjoying Holtzbert week and all of the lovely posts associated.
> 
> So I apologize if anyone was inconvenienced and hope that you instead enjoyed the other great content floating about.
> 
> Here is the next installment. I hope that you enjoy, but if you don't that is perfectly acceptable as well.

 

 

( _ )

 

Three weeks pass and Holtz is just getting used to their new routine, where Erin pops by the lab in the afternoons, sometimes with pastries, but always with an eagerness that is infectious. Bubbles out of her in short bursts of surprised, nervous laughter when she’s able to unify the scattered pieces of their data with a set of intricate equations, weaves them together with a delicate precision that leaves Holtz rapt and reeling.

 

Her mental folder on Erin has begun to overflow. Small notes welling up over the brim to spill into every corner of her mind where they linger, bob to the surface unsolicited as Holtz walks home or showers or lies awake listening to the soft hum of the street light outside her window. She hadn’t expected Erin to be so… much. So focused and intense. So gentle and fun and generous. So determined and _smart,_ and she’s struggling to keep all of her thoughts tidy, corralled away from the darker corners of her mind and the nooks in her chest. She fails, of course, thinks of brownian motion and Harry Houdini as Erin laughs easily at something Holtz has said and the sound tucks itself behind her sternum.

 

She thinks as she’s pinning up her hair one morning of the way Erin paces in front of the whiteboard at the back of the lab, one hand splayed open to cradle the spine of a book, tendons pulling taut beneath the skin, the other holding a pen to her mouth, the tip resting lightly against the swell of her bottom lip. Holtz can recall the memory so vividly that she wonders if it will somehow become twisted into her curls, travel through her nervous system and out of her fingertips to twine itself within them as she pins back the strands. Because she knows that the same memory or maybe another similar one will remain coiled close to her mind all day, waiting to tumble out as she unfastens her hair later that night. Will drape itself across her pillow and her eyes, framing her thoughts as she tries to sleep.

 

Holtz is just getting used to the way Abby has warmed to Erin, falling slowly back into the soft familiarity that must have existed between them in a time or world before. Holtz had watched, relieved, as Abby cleared off a section of lab table explicitly for Erin to spread out her notes, a foreshadowing of a permanence that Holtz hadn’t wanted to imagine but silently hoped for each day that Erin entered the lab. And before long Abby had begun to seek out Erin’s input on burgeoning theories, would tell Holtz to hold onto a thought until the afternoon when Erin could weigh in.

 

Holtz is just getting used to their new dynamic when Erin gets fired and they lose their lab all in the span of an afternoon.

 

They had come to the lab that morning to finish drafting their plans for a containment device and by the evening had found themselves scrambling, any equipment they could pilfer piled precariously in the corners of each of their apartments. Holtz sat in the dark of her studio surrounded by the warm hum and soft blinking of her equipment, tried not to let the sting of loss spill out from behind her eyes.

 

( . . . )

 

For four days they scour the classifieds and craigslist and shake every phone tree they can think of, desperately searching for a space to reestablish their lab.

 

“Okay, there’s gotta be somewhere we haven’t thought of,” Abby says at the end of the fourth day, elbows propped on the table next to a half eaten plate of lo mein. Her eyes are pink around the edges and she brings her hands up to rub at them beneath her glasses, “Holtz, did you ask that weird cousin of yours? He hangs out with artists right? There was that one guy with the...” she brings a hand around to the back of her head and wiggles her fingers, “with the hair? He said he had a studio in an old bowling alley. We could do something like that.”

 

Holtz is watching Erin from across the table, sees her nose twitch as she grimaces at Abby. They are all exhausted from the whirlwind of the past few days that has left them completely uprooted, but Erin seems to have taken it the hardest, floundering without the rigidity and rigor of her ivy league routine. And it shows now as she sits, shoulders slumped as she nudges a soggy dumpling across her plate with her fork.

 

“Oh!” Holtz snaps her fingers. “Ponytail Tony! That guy makes _the best_ thermite, a true artist.” She kisses the tips of her fingers, flicks them through the air before reaching across the table to pluck the dumpling from Erin’s plate with her fingers and pops it into her mouth. Holtz waits for the playful admonishment that usually follows such an action but it doesn’t come, Erin only frowns down at her now empty plate, too exhausted to do anything but sigh. A warm fondness expands behind Holtz’s throat at the pitiful display and she scrunches her nose before continuing, “But yea, no-go on him. He got busted for smuggling endangered clams or something.” She flicks her hand dismissively, “buuuut, there’s this self-storage facility in Queens, the lock on the back entrance is broken…” Holtz looks between Abby and Erin expectantly, one eyebrow ticked up and a grin sliding across her lips. “Good news, no rent. Bad news, they have my picture hanging up at the front desk, so… I’ll be in disguise while we work. Are either of you allergic to synthetic hair?”

 

Erin’s jaw slackens, fork tinkling against her plate as she lets the hand holding it droop. “Holtzmann! We are not squatting in a storage locker!” Her tone is incredulous before becoming stern, head cocking slightly to one side. “We are professionals, and this is legitimate scientific research we’re conducting. We need to be serious.”

 

Holtz hears Erin, she does. But she also sees the dollop of sauce sitting just below the stiff collar of her shirt and she has to fight back a smile, purse her lips together tightly.

 

“You um… You’ve got a situation...” Holtz points. “It looks serious.”

 

“What-” Erin looks down at her front. “Aw man.” She grabs a napkin, dabbing at the stain that is seeping into the beige fabric and frowns, mumbles, “Shoot. This is my fun top.”

 

“If you guys are gonna stay you have to order something.” Bennie is standing beside their table, a take out bag clenched in one hand and the other perched on his hip.

 

“There is literally still food in front of us,” Abby sweeps her arm over the dishes that clutter the tabletop. She raises her eyebrows pointedly at Bennie and continues, “Which if we’re being honest is _not_ what I ordered. You know my order, it’s the same thing every time.”

 

Bennie shrugs, “I don’t make the rules, or the food. But you can file a complaint if you want, just put it in that box, there.” He points to the trash can sitting next to the door.

 

“Ha! Good one!” Holtz holds out her hand for a high-five above Abby’s head and Bennie smirks playfully, bumps his fist into her palm.

 

“Look, we’re in a bit of a crisis here,” Erin grips the side of the table and puffs out a distressed chuckle, ”so unless you can help us find a space that can house a fully equipped laboratory capable of conducting in-depth research into the physical and metaphysical unknown, then you should probably give us a few minutes to come to terms with our imminent homelessness and complete ostracization from the scientific community.” Erin brings her hands to rest on either side of her plate, fingers flexed slightly upward and palms pressed into the wood. Holtz hasn’t seen her this tightly wound since the day she arrived in the lab, so she drops her chin into her hand to watch as Erin takes a deep shuddering breath and turns back to Bennie, a pleading tone undercutting her voice. “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. That was rude. Please don’t kick us out.”

 

There’s a pause, three sets of eyes aimed at Bennie expectantly. He blinks, points to the booth next to theirs, “Are you talking about the sign?” Propped in the window is a piece of cardboard with black marker scrawled across both sides that reads:

 

Space available.

Second floor.

~~Ask~~ Enqire within

 

Holtz glances briefly to Erin who is still squinting at the display dubiously, catches her slowly mouthing ‘enqire…’ before turning to Abby. She inclines her head toward Holtz, eyebrows raised in silent deliberation. Holtz responds with a shrug, a _‘why not’_ inscribed into the gesture which Abby picks up on easily, crosses her arms and turns back to face Bennie who is jingling his keys impatiently.

 

“What kind of space are we talking about?”

 

( . _ )

 

“Jesus, Holtzmann. How much more is there?” Erin grunts through clenched teeth. She’s straining to maintain her grip on the edges of a large cart, hands grasping the frame tightly as she ascends the stairs of the restaurant backwards. In theory, Holtz had thought that fastening all of the loose components of their unfinished containment device to the cart’s frame would make moving it more efficient, prevent the pieces from being separated in the scuffle, but in practice it only makes her muscles burn and the frame slip across the sweat that is coating her skin as they struggle to lug the cart to the second floor.

 

They’d spent the last several hours moving equipment from the scattered corners of the city, weaving the bulky meters and tubing through the muggy sidewalks to their new headquarters above the restaurant. They had planned to work separately, move the pieces from their homes individually since they all lived in opposite directions. So when Erin had emptied her own apartment of the few lab materials she had taken with her, dumped them unceremoniously onto the steel table that would become their lab bench and turned almost immediately to Holtz to offer up her assistance, Holtz had frowned. Scanned the room to make sure the veiled eagerness that sat behind Erin’s tone wasn’t a trick, an acoustic anomaly of the new space, until her gaze fell on Abby and the way her eyebrows quirked at Erin playfully. “What, you don’t want to carry dangerous radioactive devices onto the subway with me? C’mon Erin, where’s your sense of adventure?”

 

“Yeeea, sorry. No. I’m gonna walk. Slowly. As one _should_ with potentially explosive material. But thank you, for considering me. For your public safety hazard. Maybe next time.” Erin had shrugged sarcastically before winding her arm through the crook of Holtz’s elbow and tugging her toward the door. She’d dressed down for the move, replacing stiff tweed and starched collars with a faded Columbia tshirt and jeans, and Holtz tried to ignore the way the slightly damp skin at the inside of Erin’s forearm clung to her tricep.

 

Holtz is looking up at that same forearm now from behind the heavy cart, thinks absently of runway lights and the striations in flowers that guide insects to pollen as she follows the line of muscle up to the vein that sits nestled in the dip of the antecubital space, throbbing independently of the surrounding muscles that flutter and contract as they haul the equipment up another step.

 

“Your place is tiny,” Erin puffs, takes a step up, “how did you even cram all this stuff in there?”

 

“Okay Erin, first you’re doing great.” Holtz shifts the weight of the cart to rest against her shoulder, “I love your inquisitiveness,” she wheezes and pushes up the next step, “and your tasteless choice of verbs.” A wheel catches on the lip of a step and Holtz grunts, adjusts her grip before continuing. “But I’m gonna need you to use those pretty little legs and lift just a bit higher or this train won’t make it to the station.”

 

“I’m trying. What is this made of? Tungsten?”

 

“No, but there is a _tiny_ bit of plutonium on board,” Holtz puffs, “so you probably want to avoid jostling it as much as possible. Unless you want to, you know, _boom._ ”

 

“What!” Erin reaches the top of the staircase, dropping the front wheels of the cart to the landing in surprise. The cart clatters and she winces, tentatively grabs the frame again to steady it.

 

“I’m kidding!” Holtz gives one last heave, the back wheels of the cart coming to land fully on the floor. “It’s the radiation exposure you should be worried about,” she says and pats the side of the machinery.

 

“Oh. Great.” Erin breathes. She drags the back of her hand across her forehead and looks to Holtz expectantly.

 

“That should be the last of it.” Holtz sighs, slumping against the nearest wall. She lets her body slide down until she’s half sprawled across the floor, shoulders propped against deep red wallpaper. She lifts a hand to her forehead, tipping an imaginary cap, “Your assistance is much appreciated,” before letting it fall bonelessly to her leg, the edge of her palm slapping her thigh and rolling onto the floor with a thud.

 

Erin grunts an acknowledgment and shuffles to the space in front of Holtz’s feet, collapsing slowly into a sitting position, knees bent and arms stretched out behind to prop herself up. She lets her head fall back for a moment before muttering, “Too many stairs. Too much heavy…” and a deep exhale slips past her lips as Holtz watches her unfold her limbs the rest of the way to lie flat on her back. The motion reminds her of the way an origami crane reverts back to a creased sheet of paper again and she thinks of mountain folds and geometric patterns, follows the angle of Erin’s arm as it extends perpendicular from where her torso rests inches from Holtz’s feet, palm sliding along the floor to frame the side of Holtz’s leg.

 

Erin’s eyes slip closed and they spend several long moments in a soft silence, only broken by their syncopated breathing and the creak of fabric against the floor as Holtz sinks further into it. Holtz can feel the air shift slightly but it’s too humid and thick, does little to dry the thin sheen of sweat that coats her skin as it rolls across her and she lifts her gaze to the open window at the other end of room. The light streaming through is blunted and hazy in the way Holtz remembers from lazy summer afternoons in her youth and it casts a pink glow across the floor as it reflects off the deep red wallpaper. She looks down at Erin, to the damp strands of hair sticking to her forehead and the flush that sits high on her cheekbones, marvels at how the soft glow of the room blends seamlessly with the pink of her skin, with the gentle curve of her lips.

 

Holtz draws in a deep breath, tries to convince herself that it’s not leering, merely observation. But she knows it’s a feeble effort, can feel her heart picking up again as she drags her eyes away from the sharp line of Erin’s jaw to stare at the laces of her boot. Because she really does respect Erin, has a deep appreciation for her stunning intellect and she doesn’t want to undermine that, subvert such a remarkable trait with ogling and objectification. But it’s becoming exponentially more difficult to write off the twist in her gut every time Erin sends her a warm smile when they get carried away in conversations on manifold topology, or touches her arm lightly to grab her attention while Holtz is soldering, or sends her a tiny curious smirk when she catches Holtz watching her from across the lab.

 

And today it had been especially difficult, because Erin had been so loose and free with her laughter and her speech in a way that made Holtz’s chest ache as they wove the heavy equipment through the throngs of people on the sidewalks, shoulders bumping more frequently than what Holtz thought was statistically allowed for by chance.

 

But Holtz doesn’t want to think about the potential implications of it all right now, about how curiosity has morphed into something else entirely or about how all the potential outcomes of exploring that something carry the possibility of ending in complete disaster and calamity, so she packs it away for later. Makes a mental vow to shift her focus for the rest of the day from Erin to the task of setting up her equipment in their new space.

 

She stretches her arms above her head and nudges Erin’s side with the toe of her boot. “Are you broken?”

 

“Mmph. We should have hired movers,” Erin murmurs, barely moving her lips.

 

Holtz snorts. “Yea, lesson learned…” Her words trail away, the soft breeze carrying them off as she shifts her foot and sees a sliver of pale skin at Erin’s waist, the crest of her hip bone exposed and jutting up between the fabric of her shirt and jeans.

 

Something twists low in her gut and Holtz almost laughs at how quickly her mind can break it’s own vow but the air is too thick, too cloying, and her breath sticks behind her larynx. She makes a token effort to look away before her eyes fall back to the smooth expanse that rises and falls in tandem with Erin’s breathing. And of course her mind flashes, fingers twitching at the thought of feeling the weight of that hip in her palm, circling her thumb over the bone and dropping into the hollow dip, like dropping coins into a well, sending the smooth muscles rippling and fluttering. She swallows hard, can feel herself crossing an invisible line in her mind as every thought and feeling that she’d tamped down and buried away in neat little boxes come crashing to the forefront.

 

And she knows that she’s been playing with fire for weeks, has been toeing the line of curiosity and infatuation, but she hadn’t realized just how close she’d gotten to the blaze. Can feel the spark that had been crackling to life intermittently behind her ribs bloom into a small flame, every seemingly extraneous detail she’d noted and stored about Erin being slowly drawn toward it, one by one stoking it like kindling.

 

But there’s also a voice whispering incessantly at the back of her mind that this isn’t hers to see, that she hasn’t been granted access, that it could be someone else’s. And she hadn’t thought to ask Erin before if she was seeing anyone but now she has to know, _needs_ to know. Feels the question welling up through her to push against the back of her tongue before she speaks.

 

“Don’t you know anyone from Columbia we could have conned into carrying the heavy stuff? Like a beefy colleague or your boyfriend or that security guard that escorted you out when you got fired.”

 

Erin laughs, eyes still closed and head tilting back slightly against the floor, and Holtz almost convinces herself to look away from Erin’s throat as it bobs softly, almost. “Have you _been_ to Columbia before? It’s a bunch of old white guys with big egos and poorly tailored suits. Not a lot of _beefy_ guys wandering around the physics department.”

 

Holtz waits for a moment but Erin doesn’t continue, doesn’t answer the other parts of her question, just takes a deep breath and pulls herself into a sitting position. Holtz doesn’t repeat herself, knows the importance of rests between musical notes and empty space between matter, knows that it says just as much to not say anything at all. She thinks of ciphers and morse code and wishes she was fluent in Erin’s silences.

 

“What about your friend _Brian Greene_?” She isn’t sure if she’s asking if he would help with the move or if he’s more than a friend and she thinks Erin may be just as uncertain by the way she looks over to her, eyes squinting and the corners or her lips twitching into that familiar curious smile.

 

Erin drops her eyes to Holtz’s boots, sucks her lips between her teeth and brings a finger up to scrape absently at a small splatter of solder dotted near the laces. “Um, yea. I don’t actually know him…”

 

Holtz’s eyes go blank for a moment as her mind switches gears, processing the words before a grin creeps up into her cheeks. “Excuse me, I don’t think I heard you correctly.” She pushes herself off the wall to sit fully upright, hand coming to rest against her chest in exaggerated shock, “Did Erin Gilbert just say that she _lied_ about knowing a famous physicist?!”

 

“Oh god. It sounds bad when you say it out loud.” Erin brings both of her hands up to cover her eyes but Holtz can see the embarrassed smile peeking out from behind her palms. “I wanted Abby to think that I was successful and it just sort of came out!” Her hands drop to her lap. “I saw him from across the room at a conference,” she holds up her pointer finger, “so technically I’ve met him.”

 

“That does _not_ count! You know that right?” Holtz laughs.

 

“Yea. I know.” She sighs. “I just wanted to impress Abby.” Erin’s eyes flick up to Holtz’s for a fraction of a second before they fall to her hands. “And you, I guess.” She pauses, lips pursed holding back a smile and Holtz’s heart trips over a beat before Erin continues. “I don’t know why though, you guys are lunatics.” Erin slaps her hands against the floor and moves to push herself up.

 

Holtz’s jaw slackens in a mix of disbelief and stunned amusement and she reaches out to push Erin’s shoulder lightly. The action knocks Erin off balance as she tries to stand and she falls back to the floor with a muffled thud. The laugh she had been holding back bubbles it’s way past her lips and Holtz can’t help but join in with an amused one of her own.

 

“Well,” Holtz says once her laughter ebbs away and she stands swiftly, “I’m pretty sure having imaginary friends makes you a lunatic too, Gilbert.” She reaches out a hand to Erin, “I guess that means you’re an official member of the team. Welcome.”

 

Erin grins up at her from the floor before grasping her hand and slowly pulling herself up. She holds onto Holtz’s hand for a beat longer than is necessary before pulling away, and Holtz feels her shiver quake through her whole body as Erin’s fingertips drag lightly across her palm.

 

“Thanks, Jill.” It’s no more than a whisper but Holtz feels it echo through her like a shot as Erin smiles gently and turns away.

 

Holtz thinks of conduction and convection and combustion as she watches Erin tug the abandoned cart to the lab table, hopes beyond hope that the flickering flame that is thrumming in her chest won’t burn her.

  
( _ . . . )

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Patty was supposed to make her debut in this chapter but alas she has been postponed until next. 
> 
> Let me know what you like/hate.


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